Back in 2009, two of my daughter met me in Greece for a presentation we were doing! Since it was our first trip here, we enjoyed Athens and the sites! Here we are atop the area hosting the Parthenon and overlooking their beautiful city! #Greece #Athens

“…Neuro-physiological methods were adopted to measure subcortical and cortical responses to speech in the brains of two groups of adolescents in a high school in the Chicago area. One group took part in group musical training and one group took part in a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programme. Enrolment on to one of these two programmes was part of the curriculum of the schools with which the lead researcher, Adam Tierney of Northwestern University, worked….”

“… Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists.

“This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”…”

“…in a new Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School study published in Cell Reports, researchers found that when the hormone glucagon like peptide-1 (GLP-1) was reduced in the central nervous system of laboratory mice, they overate and consumed more high fat food.

“The mice in which the GLP-1 deficiency was induced ate beyond the need for calories and showed an increase preference for high fat food,” says Vincent Mirabella, a medical school and doctoral student who co-authored the study. “Conversely when we enhanced GLP-1 signaling in the brains of mice we were able to block the preference of high fat foods.”…”

“… Nicolas Dumay of the University of Exeter explains: “Sleep almost doubles our chances of remembering previously unrecalled material. The post-sleep boost in memory accessibility may indicate that some memories are sharpened overnight. This supports the notion that, while asleep, we actively rehearse information flagged as important. More research is needed into the functional significance of this rehearsal and whether, for instance, it allows memories to be accessible in a wider range of contexts, hence making them more useful.”…”

“While working on her doctoral thesis in Stern’s work group, Daniela Nussbaumer also found evidence of this effect for the first time in a group of people possessing above-average intelligence for tasks involving what is referred to as working memory. “We measured the electrical activity in the brains of university students, enabling us to identify differences in brain activity between people with slightly above-average and considerably above-average IQs,” explained Nussbaumer. Past studies conducted to identify the effect of neural efficiency have generally used groups of people that exhibit extreme variations in intelligence.”

“…When people listen to speech, neural activity is correlated with each word’s “sound envelope”—the fluctuation of the audio signal over time corresponds to the fluctuation of neural activity over time. In the new study, Lorenzo Magrassi, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pavia in Italy, and his colleagues made electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings from 16 individuals. The researchers measured neural activity directly from the surface of the language-generating structure known as Broca’s area as subjects read text silently or aloud. (This measurement was made possible by the fact that participants were undergoing brain surgery while awake.)…”

]]>http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=31950Preparing for GRE Psychology #intropsych #PsychScience #psychologyhttp://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3192
http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3192#commentsWed, 29 Jul 2015 22:37:55 +0000http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3192
It’s fun to see one of my new books reach my hands!
I especially love the idea that I am helping the next generation of psychologists meet their goals!

“Still mysterious, however, is how grid and place cells obtain the information that every GPS system requires: the angle and speed of an object’s movement relative to a known starting point, says Edvard Moser, co-author of the new study along with May-Britt Moser, his spouse and collaborator. If the brain does indeed contain a dynamic, internal map of the world, “there has to be a speed signal” that tells the network how far an animal has moved in a given period of time, he says.”

““Because some studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease is more common among older African-Americans than European-Americans, we wanted to see whether the brain changes caused by Alzheimer’s are different in these two racial groups,” said study author Lisa L. Barnes, PhD, with Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “Studying how Alzheimer’s disease looks in the brain in individuals of different races may help us to further understand the disease and pinpoint strategies for prevention and treatment.””

“In new research, the team led by Scripps Florida biologist Damon Page found that mutations in PTEN, which approximate those found in a subgroup of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, lead to dynamic changes in the number of two key cell types that make up the brain—neurons and glia. At birth, neurons are more abundant than normal. Surprisingly, in adulthood the number of neurons in the brains of mutant animals is virtually the same as normal, and glia (which provide support for neurons) are overrepresented.”

““The human brain is powerful, but even it cannot make sense of the entire sum of stimuli that bombard our senses,” said Vincent P. Ferrera, PhD, the study’s senior author. Dr. Ferrera is a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Bran Behavior Institute and associate professor in the department of neuroscience (in psychiatry) at CUMC. “Instead, it selects and prioritizes information based on what is needed at any given moment—this is called attention. And while attention is a fundamental characteristic of human cognition, and something that we use all the time, the underlying brain circuits that give us this ability remain largely unclear.””

“These results suggest that since the overall hand proportions of humans are largely primitive, when the first members of the human lineage started to use and produce complex stone tools in a systematic way, “their hands were already pretty much like ours today,” said study lead author Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.”

“”We take a very simple model of choice that’s been developed for predicting perceptual decisions—like whether a dot is moving left or right—and adapt it to capture generosity,” says lead author Cendri Hutcherson, who did the work as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and now directs the Decision Neuroscience Lab at the University of Toronto. “With this simple model, we are able to explain a huge host of previously confusing patterns about how people make altruistic choices.””

““My own introspective experience of memory tends to be one of discrete snapshots strung together, as opposed to a continuous video recording,” says David Foster, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Our data from rats suggest that our memories are actually organized that way, with one network of neurons responsible for the snapshots and another responsible for the string that connects them.””

“Dr Mark Stokes, who led the research, explained: ‘This raises an important question: How can we keep a stable thought in mind while brain activity is constantly changing?’

Previously it was believed that in order to carry out a task, there would be constant brain activity related to the goal of that task. In a review of fifty years of studies using monkeys, the OHBA team found that instead there were periods when there was no brain activity related to the goal. Yet, as soon as it was necessary, these ‘activity-silent’ periods ended and the brain activity could be observed again.”

“A discovery into the workings of the human nervous system is expected to have a “transformative impact” on how scientists understand the role of perceptual-motor delays in human and animal behavior, as well as understandings of the dynamics of behavioral anticipation. The NIH-funded research project conducted by Auriel Washburn, a University of Cincinnati doctoral student in psychology, is published online this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, a journal of the American Psychological Association.”

““The ultimate goal of our laboratory and clinical research is to improve safety and outcomes in young children who have no choice but to undergo surgery with anesthesia to treat their serious health concerns,” said Andreas Loepke, MD, PhD, FAAP, lead study author and an anesthesiologist in the Department of Anesthesiology at Cincinnati Children’s. “We also have to better understand to what extent anesthetics and other factors contribute to learning abnormalities in children before making drastic changes to our current practice, which by all measures has become very safe.””

“The study, led by pediatric surgeon Nicolas Kalfa and pediatric endocrinologist Charles Sultan, was carried out over five years and examined 600 children at hospitals in four French cities, 300 of whom were boys born with hypospadias.”

“”Our study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that sugar-sweetened beverages may be linked to NAFLD and other chronic diseases including diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” said first author Jiantao Ma, Ph.D., a former doctoral student in the Nutrition Epidemiology Program at the USDA HNRCA and a graduate of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.”

“We could stop almost all psychotropic drug use without deleterious effect, says Peter C Gøtzsche, questioning trial designs that underplay harms and overplay benefits. Allan H Young and John Crace disagree, arguing that evidence supports long term use”

“The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better-designed interventions to help struggling readers.

“This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research,” said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva, a researcher at New York University, and Jessica Wise, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.”

“Is it possible to tap into the signalling in the brain to figure out where you will go next? Hiroshi Ito, a researcher at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), can now say yes. Ito has just published a description of how this happens in this week’s edition of Nature.”

““In order to create a treatment for these types of disorders, we need to understand how the decision-making process is working,” says Alexander Friedman, a research scientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the lead author of a paper describing the findings in the May 28 issue of Cell.”

““The brain has a major system that seems predisposed to get us ready to be social in our spare moments,” said Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “The social nature of our brains is biologically based.””

“The finding answers a fiercely debated question in neuroscience as to the nature of amnesia, according to Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor in MIT’s Department of Biology and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, who directed the research by lead authors Tomas Ryan, Dheeraj Roy, and Michelle Pignatelli.”

““Our findings represent an advance in our knowledge of the brain-based physiology of creativity,” said the study’s senior author, Allan Reiss, MD, professor of radiology and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

The study, to be published May 28 in Scientific Reports, also suggests that shifting the brain’s higher-level, executive-control centers into higher gear impairs, rather than enhances, creativity.”

“A new computational model based on data from rodent brains shows that “Go” and “No-Go” signals compete in the brain, originating from the nerve cells in the striatum – a part of brain that plays a crucial role in decision making, learning and various motor functions. But, the deck is stacked against the Go neurons, which are expressed in D1 type dopamine receptors, says Arvind Kumar the senior author of the study and a researcher at the Department of Computational Biology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.”

““As more women entered the labor force and became professionals, a lot of them put off having children, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, who was not involved in the analysis. “But then they realize that there’s a biological clock, and they start playing catch up as they understand the importance of family life, and know that it’s something they want.”

Gretchen Livingston, the Pew senior researcher who did the analysis, said that with so many women now earning advanced degrees, the profile of the group has probably altered.”

“”Addiction to amphetamines and cocaine devastates lives, families and communities in Oregon and across the U.S. Our research pinpoints how these addictive drugs interfere with the dopamine transporter and normal signaling in the brain, bringing us closer to developing effective treatments for people who are addicted to cocaine and amphetamines,” said Eric Gouaux, Ph.D., senior scientist in the Vollum Institute at OHSU, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.”

“Now, using optogenetics, a technique that controls neural activity with light, MIT researchers have provided the first evidence that directly links FD neurons to face-discrimination in primates—specifically, differentiating between males and females.

Working with macaque monkeys trained to correctly identify images of male or female faces, the researchers used a light-sensitive protein to suppress subregions of FD neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex, a visual information-processing region. In suppressing the neurons, the researchers observed a small yet significant impairment in the animals’ ability to properly identify genders.”

“At IBM Research, meanwhile, researchers “are working to create a FORTRAN for neurosynaptic chips,” according to Dharmendra S. Modha, principal investigator and senior manager, IBM Research. Modha, in an IBM video on building blocks for cognitive systems, remarked how much sensors, cameras, and microphones now populate earth and space. “We are inundated with realtime noisy multimodal data.” In turn, today’s computers are increasingly challenged, he said, by power, by volume, and by speed of response. “Cognitive computing is a new synthesis of software and silicon inspired by the brain.””

“”It’s a small, but important step,” said Dmitri Strukov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. With time and further progress, the circuitry may eventually be expanded and scaled to approach something like the human brain’s, which has 1015 (one quadrillion) synaptic connections.

For all its errors and potential for faultiness, the human brain remains a model of computational power and efficiency for engineers like Strukov and his colleagues, Mirko Prezioso, Farnood Merrikh-Bayat, Brian Hoskins and Gina Adam. That’s because the brain can accomplish certain functions in a fraction of a second what computers would require far more time and energy to perform.”

“Published May 4, 2015, in Nature Neuroscience, the new findings may eventually lead to treatment strategies targeted for the underlying causes of schizophrenia and related disorders, said the study’s corresponding author Scott Soderling, an associate professor of cell biology and neurobiology in the Duke School of Medicine.

Schizophrenia is complex at every level, from genes to brain to behavior, said Soderling, who is also a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. People with the illness show a wide range of symptoms that vary in severity. Genome-wide association studies have implicated hundreds of mutations that might confer risk.”

“Today, an article published in Cell by Manel Esteller, director of the Epigenetics and Cancer Biology Program of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), ICREA researcher and Professor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona, describes the possible existence of a sixth DNA base, the methyl-adenine (mA), which also help determine the epigenome and would therefore be key in the life of the cells.”

“Wei-Chuan Shih, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH, said the lens can work as a microscope, and the cost and ease of using it — it attaches directly to a smartphone camera lens, without the use of any additional device — make it ideal for use with younger students in the classroom.

It also could have clinical applications, allowing small or isolated clinics to share images with specialists located elsewhere, he said.”

“Although the human ability to write evolved from our ability to speak, writing and talking are now such independent systems in the brain that someone who can’t write a grammatically correct sentence may be able say it aloud flawlessly, discovered a team led by Johns Hopkins University cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp.”

““Until now, people with upper-limb disabilities have been limited to PCs if they want to use computers,” said developer Ahn Hyun-jin, a student at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology.”

“A key challenge in neuroscience research is identifying organizational principles of how the brain integrates sensory information from its environment to generate behavior. One of the major determinants of these principles is the structural organization of the highly complex, interconnected networks of neurons in the brain. Dr. Oberlaender and his collaborators have developed novel techniques to reconstruct anatomically-realistic 3D models of such neuronal networks in the rodent brain. The resultant model has now provided unprecedented insight into how neurons within and across the elementary functional units of the sensory cortex – cortical columns – are interconnected.”

“”It would be wonderful if we could use tDCS to enhance cognition because then we could potentially use it to treat cognitive impairment in psychiatric illnesses,” said Flavio Frohlich, PhD, study senior author and assistant professor of psychiatry, cell biology and physiology, biomedical engineering, and neurology. “So, this study is bad news. Yet, the finding makes sense. It means that some of the most sophisticated things the brain can do, in terms of cognition, can’t necessarily be altered with just a constant electric current.””

“PhD student David Troy and Dr Angela Attwood from Bristol’s Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group presented the study as part of a symposium on ‘Environmental influences on food and alcohol-related behaviour’.”

]]>http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=316913#wpa15 a wonderful experience #PsychScience #psychology #intropsych #biopsychhttp://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3167
http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3167#commentsMon, 04 May 2015 15:38:37 +0000http://laurafreberg.com/blog/?p=3167the “other” happening in Las Vegas this weekend besides “the fight of the century” was the conference of the Western Psychological Conference!

I had a great time! I met one of my early students who now is a coauthor on a textbook, friends and many students and faculty who made the trek to the desert!

“Dr Pradipta Biswas, Senior Research Associate in the Department’s Engineering Design Centre, and the other researchers provided two major enhancements to a standalone gaze-tracking system. First, sophisticated software interprets factors such as velocity, acceleration and bearing to provide a prediction of the user’s intended target. Next, a second mode of input is employed, such as a joystick.”

“The report, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), contains analysis from leading experts in the fields of economics, neuroscience, national statistics, and describes how measurements of subjective well-being can be used effectively to assess national progress. The report is edited by Professor John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; Professor Richard Layard, Director of the Well-Being Programme at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance; and Professor Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and SDSN.”

“The results will be published in the June print edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“These findings clearly indicate that humans are acutely sensitive to the harmful effects of excess dietary sugar over a broad range of consumption levels,” said Kimber Stanhope, the study’s lead author and a research scientist in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.”

“The convergence of the new dates with the DNA and fossil evidence also shows that there is now “a period of overlap of at least 3000 years between Neandertals and modern humans,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at Max Planck and senior author of the paper.”

“We are excited to show, for the first time, that reading exposure during the critical stage of development prior to kindergarten seems to have a meaningful, measurable impact on how a child’s brain processes stories and may help predict reading success,” said study author John Hutton, MD, National Research Service Award Fellow, Division of General and Community Pediatrics, Reading and Literacy Discovery Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “Of particular importance are brain areas supporting mental imagery, helping the child ‘see the story’ beyond the pictures, affirming the invaluable role of imagination.””

“A study by Rebecca Klaper at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee determined exposure to the diabetes medicine metformin causes physical changes in male fish exposed to doses similar to the amount in wastewater effluent.

In addition to intersex conditions, fish exposed to metformin were smaller in size than those not exposed, said Klaper, a professor in UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences.”

“Standing desks – also known as stand-biased desks – are raised desks that have stools nearby, enabling students to sit or stand during class at their discretion. Mark Benden, Ph.D., CPE, associate professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health, who is an ergonomic engineer by trade, originally became interested in the desks as a means to reduce childhood obesity and relieve stress on spinal structures that may occur with traditional desks. Lessons learned from his research in this area led to creation of Stand2Learn™, an offshoot company of a faculty-led startup that manufactures a classroom version of the stand-biased desk.”

“How common is “p-hacking” and what does it mean for science? I spoke to Megan Head, of the Division of Evolution, Ecology and Genetics at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. She’s the first author of “The Extent and Consequences of P-Hacking in Science”, published in PLOS Biology on March 13th.”

“A major challenge of ASD diagnosis and treatment is that the neurological condition – which affects 1 in 68 children in the United States, mostly boys – is considerably heterogeneous. Early symptoms differ between each ASD toddler, as does progression of the condition. No uniform clinical phenotype exists, in part because the underlying causes for different subtypes of autism are diverse and not well-understood.

“There is no better example than early language development,” said senior author Eric Courchesne, PhD, professor of neurosciences and co-director of the Autism Center of Excellence at UC San Diego. “Some individuals are minimally verbal throughout life. They display high levels of symptom severity and may have poor clinical outcomes. Others display delayed early language development, but then progressively acquire language skills and have relatively more positive clinical outcomes.””

“But it was a challenge to reliably differentiate brain activity caused by the two inputs from one another and from the brain’s commands to muscles, says Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, Ph.D. , an assistant research scientist at The Johns Hopkins University. To solve that problem, Steven Hsiao, Gomez-Ramirez’s late mentor, and his colleagues developed a machine that positions a monkey’s hand and delivers stimuli to its fingers.”

“The team evaluated 93 children’s attitudes toward same-sex and opposite-sex peers. Using functional MRI, which tracks how oxygenated blood flows in the brain, the researchers also analyzed brain activity in 52 children.

The amygdala was once thought of as a “threat detector,” said University of Illinois psychology and Beckman Institute professor Eva Telzer, who led the new analysis. “But increasing evidence indicates that it is activated whenever someone detects something meaningful in the environment,” she said. “It is a significance detector.””

“In the clip, the group took the world map from A Link to the Past, and animated it with the clockwork stylings from HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones.”

Watch as locations like Hyrule Castle, Death Mountain and Kakariko Village come gorgeously to life thanks to VFX artists Kial Natale, Adamah VanArsdale and Edgar Abreu-Lanza. The music for this video was done by composer Mattia Cupelli, who took the “Game of Thrones” theme tune and gave it a bit of Zelda-inspired reimagining.”

“”To our knowledge, this study is the first to show that maternal drug use during pregnancy alters the brain’s functional organization in newborns,” said Wei Gao, PhD, assistant professor of radiology in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and one of the two corresponding authors of the study, published in the April 8, 2015 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

“This study may inform new strategies aimed at early risk identification and intervention,” said Karen M. Grewen, PhD, the study’s other corresponding author and associate professor of psychiatry, neurobiology and psychology.”